I will not ever ever ever show my kids a bell curve. And only partly because it still scares me to think of how many sds from the mean they are.
I don't think it's a practical picture for them to carry around in their heads, that here's the world, and here I am, way over in the the 99.99something percentile.
Firstly, the world they inhabit is not a random sample, and doesn't follow that distribution. My husband and I don't know our IQs, but we can infer that they're fairly up there. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins are all also up there, with grade skips, tests "off the charts" and other indicators dating back three generations. Our friends and our friends kids are all probably fairly far to the right as well. My kids are not that far out of the ordinary in their daily lives, and they have at least a few kids in their classes with higher IQs than them.
Secondly, I feel like phrasing it as a difference of aptitude, interest, pace, and readiness is very much more practical. We all encounter people whose IQ might be way lower than ours but who know things we don't know and have skills we'll never master. I want to teach my children to appreciate that, and them. And even if someone is less accomplished and knowledgable than you in all ways, they can still be fun, or interesting, or whatever.
